Mass migration destroyed the Roman Empire in its time and is on course to destroying its Western counterpart in ours
There is much that the ancient world can still teach us, and one of its key lessons today is that mass migration — motivated by the ravages of war, societal collapse, poverty and human despair — is capable of destroying even the mightiest of empires.
At the height of its power, the Roman Empire was so vast and omnipotent that it was run on the basis of the dictum: “Roma locuta est. Causa finita est!” (Rome has spoken. The cause has finished).
The names of its most powerful figures are as familiar to us as our own — Pompey, Caesar, Augustus, Nero, Hadrian, Vespasian, Constantine — men whose rule over the ancient world was so dominant that the only threat they faced came from within Rome itself.
Indeed, it would have been the very definition of insanity to claim that an empire stretching from the Italian peninsula all the way across Western Europe and down into North Africa and the Middle East, enforced by legions whose very presence in the field of battle induced terror in any army unwise enough to challenge its writ, was anything other than invincible and eternal.
Yet in the year 476 AD what was then known as the Western Roman Empire came to an abrupt end after a century of successive ‘barbarian’ invasions finally succeeded in bringing Rome to its knees. The symbols of its power — in the form of the emperor’s imperial vestments, diadem, and purple cloak — were sent to Constantinople, the seat of power of the eastern half of the empire. Thus the curtain was closed on Rome’s glorious 1000-year history. It was proof that no empire, regardless of its economic and military power, lasts forever.
In truth, Rome’s demise had been a long time coming; the contradictions of an empire run on the basis of slavery, tribute, and plunder were so great it was inevitable that they would become insurmountable over time. Under Rome’s rule millions lived in poverty and squalor, supporting an elite whose wealth and ostentation was an obscenity and increasingly untenable.
Any economic system that operates on the basis of coercion, domination, and super exploitation gives rise to strong and persistent resistance to it. This in turn leads to more force, more military power, having to be deployed in order to maintain the status quo. However this can only succeed in fomenting further resistance and with it destabilization, which in turn acts as a catalyst for the mass movement of people seeking sanctuary from the chaos that ensues.
This, in sum, is what brought down the Western Roman Empire in a process the early stages of which are evident today with a growing migration and refugee crisis that is starting to chip away at the foundation of Western hegemony.
Both in Europe and the United States the issue of immigration and migration has succeeded in producing a sense of panic within governments and the political classes, to the point where political formations, parties, and movements have come to the fore in direct response to it.
In the US Donald Trump, despite the slew of felony charges he faces, has won the Republican nomination for the US presidential election in 2024. He has done so vowing to continue to focus on the issue of immigration on the US southern border if re-elected, citing the issue as the most important of any facing the ‘land of the free’ today.
You would think that the gross generalizations of migrants from south of the border he has employed so liberally — describing them as rapists, criminals, murderers, etc. — would have been so unpalatable and objectionable that he would have seen his chances of winning the Republican nomination destroyed in the name of common human decency.
On the contrary, with every speech and interview on the subject Trump merely streaked further ahead of his fellow republican opponents, playing as it did and does to the base fears of millions of Americans — white Americans in particular — when it comes to their country being ‘invaded’ and ‘flooded’ by this rascal multitude.
In Europe, meanwhile, mass migration from Africa and the Middle East has likewise resulted in an increasingly irrational and militant response on the part of the political mainstream.
Brexit in the UK was largely fought and won on the mantra of ‘controlling our own borders’, and today, eight years on, a veritable moral panic has been whipped up over the hundreds of boats bringing migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers across the English Channel. Their desperation to reach Europe, and the willingness to risk their lives in the process, is no surprise given the abject chaos many have left behind. Syria, Libya, Eritrea, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq — with each year that passes more countries in Africa and the Middle East fall prey to chaos, carnage, and destabilization.
The people fleeing these conditions are victims of a global economy that itself is in crisis, exposing the incontrovertible fact that under capitalism the development and huge wealth of the northern hemisphere is based on the under-development and crippling poverty of the southern hemisphere. All of the conflict and seemingly unconnected crises we are living through is connected to this one indisputable fact.
Unsurprisingly, the political classes sitting at the apex of this unsustainable reality are in denial, refusing to countenance for a moment their role as authors and architects of a world that creeps ever closer to the abyss. It is a congenital disorder they share with their Roman antecedents. Like them they are increasingly attached to the deployment of force and hard power to deal with the symptoms of the gross inequality and inequity that underpins a global economic and political system that is crises-ridden and unsustainable. In so doing, they continue to deepen rather than alleviate the problem.
As the Roman philosopher, Seneca, reminds us: “For greed all nature is too little.” Whether greed for power, domination, resources and wealth, the West is headed for the same fate as Rome all those centuries ago. And just as when the Roman Empire was no more, when its Western counterpart meets the same fate, millions will suffer and millions will also celebrate.
End.
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